[Sir] John Temple

Life
1600-1677; b. Dublin, eldest son of Sir William Temple, Provost of TCD, who had previously been sec. to Sir Philip Sidney; ed. TCD, BA 1618; MA 1620; Lincoln’s Inn, 1620; entered personal service of Charles I; knighted 1628; became Master of the Rolls in Ireland, 1640; assisted government at outbreak of Rebellion of 1641, but declared for Parliament and suffered imprisonment in Dublin Castle; re-appointed Master, 1655; MP for Meath, 1642, 1646; his Irish Rebellion, True and Impartial History (1644), an exaggeration of the ‘massacres’ which inflamed Protestant indignation against the native Irish; held minor office during the Protectate; joint-administrator of the great seal of Ireland, 1647; voted for compromise with Charles I, and excluded from House; served on commissions; received grants of land in Co. Dublin and appointed privy councillor on Restoration, when he was also confirmed in the office of Master of the Rolls; vie-treasurer of Ireland, 1673; thought by Denis Johnston and Sybil Le Brocquy to be the father of Jonathan Swift (see Johnston, Search of Swift, 1959, and Le Brocquy, Cadenus, 1963); buried beside his father in Trinity College. DNB FDA OCIL

Criticism
J.T.H. Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fíor Ghael (Amsterdam 1986), pp.385.

Maureen Wall, Catholic Ireland in the 18th c., ed. Gerard O’Brien (1989), pp.119-20.

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Notes
J.T.H. Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fíor Ghael (Amsterdam 1986), p.385 notes: 'The Irish parliament commemorated the rebellion each 23 October with anti-Catholic services [and] Temple’s history [The Irish rebellion, London 1646] was regularly reprinted. If one wished to ameliorate the Ascendancy’s image of Gaelic Ireland - leading to a relaxation of the penal laws - one had to start with 1641' . Reprints, 1713, 1716, 1724, 1746, 1766. [ftn.384, p.483]

Maureen Wall, Catholic Ireland in the 18th c., ed. Gerard O’Brien (1989), pp.119-20 notes: Agrarian disturbances in Munster treated as popish rebellion, ignoring similar troubles from the Steelboys in Ulster; edition of Sir John Temple’s Irish Rebellion and Archb. William King’s State of the Protestants of Ireland printed in Clonmel in 1766 for sectarian reasons. The publishers J and P Bagnell’s brother played a significant role as a magistrate in the events in Tipperary.


Muriel McCarthy and Caroline Sherwood Smith, Hibernia Resurgens: Marsh’s Irish Books [Catalogue of 1994 Exhibition] (Dublin: Marsh’s Library 1994), records that his Irish Rebellion was first printed in 1646, in keeping with the title-page date of the copy held; gives obit. date 1749 [err: DNB 1677].

Marsh’s Library, Dublin, Stillingfleet Collection, holds The Irish Rebellion (London: R. White for Samuel Gellibrand 1646), 4o.

Field Day Anthology, gen. ed. Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 1: among his children by Mary Hammond were Sir John Temple, attorney general, and Sir William Temple, pol. writer and controversialist [who patronised Jonathan Swift.]

Belfast Public Library holds The History of the Rebellion in Ireland 1641 (1646; 1679; 1746).

Belfast Linen Hall Library holds The Irish Rebellion, True and Impartial History (1644).

University of Ulster Library, Morris Collection, holds The Irish Rebellion, or an history of the attempts of the Irish Papists to extirpate the Protestants in the Kingdom of Ireland (1812).

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Quotations
Sir John Temple, quoted by ‘Quidnunc’ [Seamus O’Sullivan] in cutting from Irish Times, c.1945 [found in Albert le Brocquy’s copy of Stephen Gwynn, History of Ireland, 1923]: ‘that there is no nature of people under the sunne that doth love equall and indifferent Justice better than the Irish; or will rest better satisfied with the execution thereof, although it be against themselves, so as they may have the protection and benefit of the law, when, upon just cause they may desire it.’ Seamus O’Sullivan calls Temple ‘one of the shrewdest judges of Irish character’.

On the Irish, ‘These people of late times were so much civilised by their cohabitation with the English as that the ancient animosities and hatred which the Irish had ever observed to bear upon the English nation seemed now to be quite deposited and buried in a firm conglutination of their affection and national obligations passed between them. .. Nay they had had as it were a kind of mutual transmigration into each other’s manners, many English being strangely degenerated into Irish affections and customs, and many Irish, especially of the better sort, having taken up the English language, apparel, and decent manner of living in their private houses.’ Quoted Nicholas Canny, ‘The Formation of the Irish Mind ..1580-1750’, in Past and Present, 95 (May 1982).

In 1646 Sir John Temple advised steps so that ‘there may be ... such a wall of separation set up betwixt the Irish and the British, as it shall not be in their power to rise up (as now and in all former ages they have done)' [See Loreto Todd, The Language of Irish Literature (Dublin: Gill & Macmilan 1989), p.16.]

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Notes
His views on the amelioration of the native Irish under the influence of the Ulster plantation, ‘These people of late times were so much civilised by their cohabitation with the English ... &c.’ There is an anniversary account of the 1641 Rebellion in Fortnight 299 [n.a.] (Oct. 1991), p.23: This violence and sense of betrayal [occasioning the professional soldier Owen Roe O’Neill on his return to command the Catholic forces in 1642 to write, ‘for on both side there is nothing but blood and cruelties such as are not even usual among the Moors and Arabs’] soon entered the popular Protestant mind as one of the defining characteristics of the native Irish. the details of the atrocities were gathered together in depositions taken from those attacked in 32 volumes are still preserved in the library of TCD. In 1646 an official of the Dublin Govt., Sir John Temple, published a book composed mainly of extracts from three depositions highlighting the cruelties of the native Irish ... The History of the Rebellion in Ireland, subtitled ‘together with the barbarous cruelties and bloody massacres which ensued thereupon.’

Sir John Temple is listed as a pewholder among ninety names at the Restoration, pew no. 43, in company with Wm. Domville, Attorney gen. (47), Sir James Ware, MP for the University (48), Sir Theo. Jones, MP for Meath, nephew of James Ussher (42), William Dodwell, father of FTCD (20), Mr John Parnell (24). Almost the same people are found subscribing for the Puritan minister of 1659. Also rated in the Parish at that time were Earl of Angelesey, Viscount Ranelagh, Sir William Petty, MP for Innistioge; Sir Henry Tichbourne; Col. James Napper, MP for Enniscorthy. See The Church of S. Werburgh Dublin, by SC Hughes (1899), p.18.

God's Will: His History of the Irish Rebellion (1644) identifies English rule with God’s will and depicts the Irish Catholics as ingrates; anything but ‘true’ and ‘impartial,’ as the title-page alleges, it contributed largely to the severity of the reprisals during the Cromwellian campaign of 1649-52, and moulded the attitudes of the Protestant ascendancy. In 1689, it was burnt in Dublin by the public hangman on the orders of the short-lived Jacobite Parliament; frequently reprinted in the following century, it formed the basis of several histories of the period.

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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)